Why legalized gold selling (Gems) should not be in Guild Wars 2

Really, it shouldn't be in any game, but Guild Wars 2 is the newest of the shameful few to legalize gold selling. Call it gems, chronoscrolls or whatever other names you can come up with, it is still just legalized real money trading. Be sure to use any word except gold or the name of the game's main currency and it'll fool more people into believing it's not RMT! You see, as long as gems are in demand and tradable for gold, it's trading real world money for in-game currency. Think about why buying in-game currencies are fobidden in almost every MMORPG - It's CHEATING and it takes away the fun of the game. I mean, why would I even bother putting effort towards obtaining the rare, high priced goodies if anyone can just buy the right to flaunt them?

Legalized gold selling is a hypocrisy, a lie, and a money grab all combined into one. Legalized gold selling supposedly exists to get rid of gold sellers, cheaters and unfairness, but they're all still there. If you look past the bushes made of money, you would see that Arenanet themselves have become the gold sellers! Gasp! Ban them! Or someone at least pretend like you ban gold sellers when you really don't! Sure, you can make it legal to buy gold, but does allowing steroid use (Cash shop buffs and items) in the Olympics make it fair? Does it make winning the Olympics feel like anything but a steroid dosing war? Legalizing RMT does not get rid of the underlying problem - players buying currency with real world money. And much like steroids, it kills your sex drive for the end game... You know, the part of online games where you work towards getting lots of gold, the hard to get treasures and expensive stuff? For people who played Guild Wars 1 - the FOW and 15k set armors.

(Old gem buying interface)

Really, legalized RMT is a convenient lie and profit bringer as well. You cut the gold sellers out, decieve gamers and become the gold sellers yourselves, all while pocketing the income the RMTs would have gotten. Various estimates exist, but most estimate the gold selling market to be valuated in millions of dollars per year at minimum. Pair that with a popular game, one with you being the ONLY gold selling racket in town, and you've got yourself a license to print money. Arenanet isn't going to ban themselves, but they sure as hell will ban their gold selling competitors. Hell, it isn't even guaranteed that it will stop RMT, so long as the RMT can beat Arenanet's prices. It won't even stop people who use bot programs to farm gold.

In Guild Wars 2, money matters. Siege weapon blueprints cost gold, becoming a commander costs a "Substantial sum of gold" http://www.arena.net/blog/jordan-massey-on-the-role-of-the-squad-in-wvw , STUFF costs gold. What you have in PvE is what you have in WvW. Oh yeah, there's no more side kicking up to your friends level, because that supposedly takes away from the difficulty of Guild Wars 2. But you can still buy exp buffs from the cash shop! Hmmmm!

A company has the right to make money, but the second they start shoving their hands into my pockets, I'm sorry, but I'm going to call them out on it. Not do the logical opposite and start licking their boots. With that being said, if the game was free then I would have no grounds to base my arguement, but it's not. One would think $60 bucks would buy you a game that didn't feel the need to shake you up for cash at every opportunity, but instead we get treated to a F2P game's cash shop and legalized gold selling.

Before you actually implement something as stupid as legalized RMT (Or perhaps the most cleverly disguised money grab yet!), try actually fighting the bots. The solution to stopping botting and RMT is simple, maybe banning bots instead of twiddling your thumbs while bots and RMT walk around freely in the open. They haven't even tried fighting RMT and they've already given up and implemented gems. Or maybe they're more interested in the money they could make, throwing fair play into the wind for more bucks. Adding a cash shop in a $60 game, legalized RMT and a unique elite skill for buying the deluxe and collector's edition... What's next?

From the beta, we could not see if armor skin swapping (Transmutation stones) were buyable with karma, as the karma vendors did not sell them. At least from the few that I did see. What we do know is that the cash shop item "Magic find" got a boost from giving you a 10% increase rare item drop to a 50%. And that you are given 5 bag slots, and you can magically get 2 more for a max of 7 if you buy from the cash shop! Additionally, your armor breaks when you die in PvE AND WvW. Want to walk alllll the way back to the armor repair NPC (Merchants didn't repair in the weekend event) and then walk alll the way back to what you were doing? Choose the wrong world and want to play with your friends? That'll be 1800 gems (Weekend event price).

Buy to not be inconvenienced?

Want to play WvW and PvP only? Well, bad news for you if you want to do WvW without doing PvE. Try it, and you'll be short the right half of your skill bar and your elite skill. How do you rush around to get the rest of your skills? You have to go to PvE land and do the skill challenges which require you to fight your way to getting a skill point. But... you have the problem of getting to the actual level required to do the skill challenge, and that is where the exp boost beast rears it's head. And elite skills can require around 30 skill points to learn, with each challenge giving only 1. Normal utility skills range from 1-6ish. Additionally, siege weapons cost gold too. If you want some gate busting power (Which you will need, because they literally do about a thousand more damage than you can spamming your best skills) you're going to have to pay up. Did I mention the area near any closed gate is a easy place to get killed because of the castle defenses AND the defenders can spam attacks at you from the castle walls? Siege weapons bypass this hell because almost all of them are ranged and can just shoot at the gate from a safe distance away.

Anyone remember the "Enchantment" processes in F2P games? Where you had a chance of failing pretty badly unless you bought something from the cash shop to buff you? That's what the perfect salvage kit is, except you only have a 20% chance of failing with in game stuff, assuming you buy the best kit available from the merchants.

In short - Buy gold from RMT, you get banned. Buy gems from Arenanet, you get gold! So if RMT is legal now, I guess we should start legally selling our gold for some extra spending cash now. Lets see how Arenanet sees our use of the legalized RMT now?